Touchstone screenshots now available

We have polished the UI to a point where we are happy to publish early screenshots. We hope you enjoy. Look forward to your feedback.

Remember - the ultimate goal is to make most things re-brandable/skinable as well.

You can see the Touchstone Screenshots here.

What's an Attention Engine?

While working on Touchstone tonight we have been listening to Alex Barnett’s podcast. Great stuff! (Alex has also been very kind to mention us on his blog recently as well).

This particular episode he was talking to TailRank’s Kevin Burton. It was very enjoyable to hear the voices behind the names and blogs while we worked.

One thing that we noticed though, was Alex's use of the word "Attention Engine". It was weird because we have been using this term since my post about it on the 14th of November. At the time, I didn't give it much thought and wasn't really interested if the phrase had been used before.

But it also got me thinking - what is the difference between a Meme Engine and an Attention Engine (as was being discussed by Alex and Kevin).

For our purposes though, I think we could describe it as such.

A Meme Engine is something that might make use of a number of mechanisms in order to intuit what a community (maybe even a community of one) is interested in - essentially allowing the best content on a given topic to rise to the top.

The discussion that specifically piqued our interest though was about tweaking that mechanism so that it takes your personal tastes and attention information into account.

This is, as far as I understand, what distinguishes Tailrank from the others.

An Attention Engine (as far as we were concerned as it related to Touchstone) was something that consumed data from any source (be it straight RSS from a blog, the result of a Meme Engine or even a Meme Engine skewed with your personal attention data) and found interesting ways to manage your interruptions for you while you were being productive.

This is something we feel that, right now (or soon at least), Touchstone will be uniquely positioned to do, because, being a persistent client side application, we can take into account all sorts of context indicators and client-side business logic that isn't possible in the browser sandbox.

Help my bandwidth costs are killing me!

Ash and I were talking recently about how RSS can take a toll on hosting and bandwidth. Well there is a group trying to solve this problem with what is essentially a P2P or bittorrent type load sharing mechanism called feedtree. Great idea!

Shopping with OPML

I just found this great post about how OPML could be used to extend the great work Amazon (or other services) already does trying to work out what matters to you. It's funny though how the blogoshere works, I found the post via another post that basically summarized it. So I will link to both!

The original post I found at Mark's blog
Lisa's post - the actual subject of all this cross linking.

OPML Reading lists and rankings

There has been quite a bit of talk lately about using OPML for more than just storing a manifest of RSS feeds for one's personal use.

The discussion includes lots of great ideas that are best summed up by a post I found on library clips. Well worth the read!

How do you subscribe to a RSS feed?

This might sound like a silly question on a blog for, what is effectively, an RSS gadget.

But it's a valid question that many of our users will be asking us when they get their hands on Touchstone.

It's a question we have been asking ourselves when trying to think of interface design for giving the user the best possible experience when adding a feed to their list.

There have been a number of attempted solutions to this problem, some of which are discussed by this great post by Jeffrey Veen but it seems that the experience is destined to remain inconsistent from app to app for at least the short term.

Windows Vista also promises a subscription system built into IE7 that will make the subscription processes easier.

But none of this solves the problem universally. I guess this is both the power and complexity of the web in general and RSS specifically. It is so simple, and so open to interpretation that there are bound to be many flavors of implementation.

For now, as developers, we are forced to build in as many help mechanisms as possible to get that little URL into our apps.

There are so many possibilities. Tracking the clipboard like our friends at FeedDemon (and others I'm sure), allowing for blog search like Google Reader does, and feed discovery like Safari and the upcoming IE7.

If we wanted to go bonkers, we could write a plug-in for all browsers that discovered feeds for us - using various methods and mechanisms - but it's an awful lot of work for one program when the problem affects us all.

Private Alpha and Site Changes to Celebrate

We are at Private Alpha!

We have a small band of merry men (and elf’s and ompa lompas) currently testing our little baby. It's great! Soon we will take over the world... *cough* oh that was secret. Shh don't tell anyone.

Also, I have uploaded a whole new section of the website available via a number of 'speech bubbles' up the top of the home page.

These 'Bubbles' allow us to talk about usage scenarios for Touchstone in specific terms depending on the type of user who might be using the program.

We are also trying to minimize references to RSS and 'other adapters' to make Touchstone a little less geeky and a little more accessible to mom and dad. For now we are just focusing on the idea of 'subscribing to sites you care about'.

If you would like the private alpha, please drop us a line and we will see what we can do!

Alpha by Sunday night? Maybe

Alpha not far away, guys - in fact thanks to the assistance of a good mate of mine (the StormWarden) who managed to crack a C# AppBar class and get the ticker docking properly. He also added to this by creating types of docks, so you can limit the docking to "Top and Bottom", "Left and Right", or "All Sides". Naturally you can set visualizations to always "float".

He has offered to extend this class so the visualization will dock to the current window with the focus, giving Chris the title bar ticker he wants SOOOOO badly.

...And now for something completely different:

Bi-Directional RSS - Something Chris and I were discussing in our deluded states last night: It occurred to me that the TouchStone outputs do not have to be restricted to the users screen. I think that the possibility of bi-directional RSS is a great idea, and it’s quite exciting because the TouchStone architecture completely accommodates this idea. TouchStone Server...might be a future side project for unilaterally dissecting, prioritizing and parsing RSS feeds and output them in a number of ways, including back into RSS.

Imagine a TouchStone UI which can administer 1000’s of RSS feeds (and other content sources) and filter them for an entire household. RSS alone takes enormous bandwidth – so it would save time and resources (not to mention precious bandwidth) if a UI were developed to determine which household members want which content and using that same UI as an adapter to another TouchStone Core, on another machine. Bi-directional RSS makes this even more powerful again, allowing people to post and reply to content as it is streamed to them live.

Feed usage report

Reading through my feeds today I came across an interesting post titled "RSS is exploding, going beyond blogs" which is about Feedburner's 'Feed for Thought' report.

Interesting reading! Thought I would share.

Still working...

We're still working on Alpha 1. We have completely re-designed the entire UI (just for kicks hah) and are working on implementing the final changes. Hope to have the alpha ready to post tonight or in the early hours of this morning!

*Update at 1:31am* we ran into a few glitches (mainly the IDE working against us actually) so we are postponing the release until next time. Sorry!

RSS Gadget

I have been talking to friends and colleagues about Touchstone and often the first question I get asked is "Oh so it's an RSS Gadget?"

And my answer is always a "Well... yes and no".

That's where it gets more complicated than people like for an 'elevator pitch'.

As we have said in previous posts Touchstone is a gadget that could and will be used to display RSS - and that is absolutely it's first useful function - but in the long run we see it as a persistent (hangs around), discreet (gets out of the way) attention manager (tells you what matters while you're being productive).

How is this different? Because the information Touchstone manages for you may not be coming from RSS - but rather form adapters that get content/alerts from local and web-based applications.

So Touchstone is absolutely useful as an RSS Gadget - but that is just the tip of our little iceberg.

OPML Goodness

We now have the RSS adapter loading up a list of feeds from an OPML file.

I loaded up my FeedDemon feeds with a couple of clicks and now Touchstone Alpha is sitting on my desktop giving me my headlines while I type this.

As one would expect, we are going to make sure Touchstone supports all the great standards we all know and love. Supporting RSS and OPML are just our first steps.

We are very close to the first official Alpha release. I am very excited!

Props have to go to Ashley for being able to whip this thing up so fast. He's a champion.

According to Touchstone - "Firefox 1.5 is finally coming... maybe" - good to know!

Momentum

Momentum... It’s a wonderful thing… it allows us to feel the wind on our backs and create snowball effects of productivity and/or fun.

Many people often overlook momentum as a key driver for success when it comes to business, communities and life.

I think it’s safe to say that we now have development momentum with Touchstone. We are building new features and polishing up UI components more quickly than we ever expected and it's only encouraging us to do more.

Today I developed our “Single Ticker” UI and Ash implemented it. This effectively makes the app usable! It’s very exciting! But it also makes me think about the work we still need to do to get a more important type of momentum… Community Adoption.

I think that Touchstone is a wonderful idea (obviously) but the thing that will really make it shine is a level of community interest and involvement that makes our little project more than a few lines of code… something that gives it life.

Attention Attention everywhere...

Nick Bradbury and a number of RSS/Attention heavy weights are discussing methods and mechanisms for determining and storing attention information in either OPML or a dedicated Attention XML format.

I have, for a long time, used FeedDemon and I love Nick's work. With a growing number of aggregators generating and supporting Attention data we will all have a better experience trying to read and manage our news!

You can find the latest two posts from Nick here.

Attention.opml or Attention.rss?
An Attention Namespace for OPML

As we have always stated, TouchStone is not a competitor to full-fledged RSS readers. Rather it is a persistent UI that acts as a companion to any site/service so that the user can read news/updates/information about their applications at all times (in a ticker or sidebar format).

It so happens that we are all excited about RSS, but Touchstone could very well be a handy Microsoft Money companion as well (for example).

For example, Nick's FeedDemon could use Touchstone to alert the user of new content it acquires from feeds.

Why wouldn't he just stick to his existing alert system? He could!

But by using Touchstone as a supplement, he (or other developers) could take advantage of all the time we're spending on new and fancy alerts and a persistent news ticker/sidebar type interface that keeps the user informed even while FeedDemon is minimized.

When the user is ready to read their news - they would click the headline on Touchstone and head right back to FeedDemon where they belong.

Website online

I just posted our very first website. This will be a landing page for the general public to come on and learn about our modest little gadget.

I am sure there is lots of room for improvement - but it's something to get us started!

What's in a name?

Today we sat down and reviewed the entire Touchstone architecture. We had done this before, and the result of our review was simply to clarify some points, crystallize some others and make sure we were both on the same page.

Basic things like the system will be event driven so that a change at the source will invoke a change in the UI as quickly as possible. XML will be used at all end-points and will be transformed into memory data structures internally for speed and efficiency.

It was all very interesting - the result was a pretty Viso diagram we can stick on our wall.

One major thing that did result from the discussion was our new component names. I will give you some examples:

1. The Bag it and Tag it Parser
2. The How Important is it Parser
3. Make the UI do Something Parser

According to Ashley we must now stick to these naming conventions (apparently I was the one that set the rule about naming conventions being of the utmost importance).

When I mentioned that I thought it might be a bit cumbersome to refer to various parts of the system by these names, Ash said I may refer to them as whatever I want when he's not around - as long as it's not on the blog, or in the public domain, or with people.

So I guess... He's really bossy.

Added FeedBurner

I just added FeedBurner/XML subscription icon on the right of the page. You would think Blogger would make this easier/built in.

Now that we have your Attention

This is a follow up to my previous post "Can we have your Attention please?"

Attention is getting more and more ‘press’ in the blog-o-sphere these days - so much so in fact, that my latest attempt to read all my feeds today has helped crystallize some ideas.

Current Landscape

• Gathering information about your attention is well underway (attentiontrust etc).
  
  
• Acting on your attention to give you the right type of information is underway (Google Desktop and Amazon’s recommendation engine).
  
  
• Collecting ‘group attention’ information and using it as filter to sort content is at the heart of many new sites/projects/companies (memorandum, digg).
  

Fundamental Principles

• Attention is a commodity that each of us are quickly sapping each day (Attention Deficit).
  
  
• Attention is a renewable resource that can, on a day-by-day basis, be better used and focused to achieve our personal goals.
  
  
• If we’re not careful there will be so much information that most of the population will simply ‘turn off’.
  

Room for innovation
Even with all these great services the result is still more RSS. There is room on the edges, where users actually get their hands on the RSS, to help them digest it more effectively. Specifically:

• Giving your attention should not be a chore (This is distinct and different from giving information about your attention – which is already collected automatically by Amazon type systems). I am talking about feed readers and other mechanisms for focusing your attention on something.
  
  
• Once your attention is focused, the relevant site/service/content should add something to your day (enjoyment, productivity, experience, knowledge etc) in a way that fits into your lifestyle without requiring you to shift gears all the time (e.g staying informed while you work - rather than having to bury your nose in a feed reader all the time).
  

I call these two items “Content Form Factor”.

But this is not the Form Factor that device manufacturers talk about when they talk about PDAs, Tablets, Cell phones etc – I am talking about the method that content on those devices is packaged up and delivered to your eyes (or ears) in ways that make sense based on importance, priority, relevance, context and the attention preferences or automatically generated attention profile of the participant.

The issue at hand is not how to get a user’s attention information (that’s easy) but rather how to help the user manage what their paying attention to across all the things they care about – both local and in the cloud. To service their needs intuitively.

Content as a service.

Update: All of this was obviously a prelude to our thoughts and ideas for Touchstone. We have since made some important updates and announcements about how Touchstone will help users focus their attention... these include:

'I think therefore I-AM'

'What's an Attention Engine'

Moving Parts

Early on in this project (I guess it's still early on - but I mean even earlier than now - like in the first 'meeting') we decided that Touchstone would actually be made up of 3 categories of moving parts.

They were.

1) The Adaptors
2) The 'Core'
3) The Visualizations

This meant that 3rd parties could write Adaptors and Visualizations to add value to the app!

But recently I had to go into Photoshop and design an interface for 'The Core'. The mandate was to create something elegant and simple that would not really clash with any visualization or skin that was eventually created or used with Touchstone.

But when I sat down to start, something became quickly apparent. 'The Core' was a boring ass name :)

So... I renamed it. 'The Attention Engine'. This is, as the previous name suggested, the core of Touchstone. The adaptors feed the engine, and the engine feeds the visualizations.

I mocked it up and ran it by Ash - he says he loves it! (he's not one to lie so I believe him hah).

Here is the mock-up for anyone who might be interested!

I also designed a wallpaper today because I recently got two beautiful 19' Samsung monitors that needed some nice eye candy in the background!

We have RSS!

I just saw System Tray alerts fire off based on TorrentSPY RSS. Wow :)

Ok so it isn't going to put Microsoft out of business (was that even a stated goal? hah) but it is bringing back lots of memories of earlier projects when we wern't working just to meet customer expectations and budget constraints - but rather working to create something. Something we loved.

We since switched it over to whedonesque.com RSS because:

a) It's less illegal
b) Whedon is our master now

Back to making the settings screen for me now...